Obama meets top lawmakers in tough deficit talks

Saturday

Nov 17, 2012 at 6:00 AM

By Jackie Calmes THE NEW YORK TIMES

Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress emerged from their first budget meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House at midday Friday and, in a rare show of bipartisan bonhomie, jointly expressed confidence that the two parties will reach an agreement before the end of the year to avert economy-rattling tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts.

The four leaders — two Republicans, House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader; and two Democrats, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader — politely took turns at a microphone outside the West Wing, addressing each other by first names and describing the roughly 90-minute session as constructive.

“We feel very comfortable with each other, and this isn’t something we’re going to wait until the last day of December to get done,” Reid said.

“This isn’t the first time that we’ve dealt with these issues,” he added. “We feel we understand what the problem is. And we felt very — I feel very good about what we were able to talk about in there. We have the cornerstones of being able to work something out. We’re both going to have to give up some of the things that we know are a problem.”

Boehner said he outlined a framework for overhauling the tax code and spending programs that is “consistent with the president’s call for a fair and balanced approach.”

“To show our seriousness,” he added, “we put revenue on the table as long as it’s accompanied by significant spending cuts.”

McConnell made plain that Republicans were talking about spending for the entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid, which are growing fast as the population ages and, along with military spending, are squeezing everything else in the federal budget. Republican senators, McConnell said, “fully understand that you can’t save the country until you have entitlement programs that fit the demographics of the changing America in the coming years.”

Pelosi, whose House Democratic colleagues include many liberals who resist significant changes to entitlement spending, said: “We understand our responsibility here. We understand that it has to be about cuts, it has to be about revenue, it has to be about growth, it has to be about the future.”